Saturday, February 12, 2011

Touched off by Joe Romm, whom Keith Kloor does not like, but now with Coby Beck and Michael Tobis and a whole raft of others chiming in is the question of whether climate change had any role in touching off the recent successful Egyptian demonstrations pointing to rising global food prices. They are all wrong.

Eli is going around pointing out that destiny is geography in Egypt, hinting that even now climate change is playing a role in Egyptian food production and more. Here is a puzzler, what are the Rabettoneurons thinking.

A handy map is provided, but Google can be your friend. Starting place for the answer below the fold

70 comments:

Egypt imports half its grain and is the world's largest importer of wheat by a fair margin.That means yes, geography is destiny, but yes, Egypt is especially vulnerable to global food price variations. Are you saying different?

In March 2010 I posted this about an an article in Science about the vulnerability of Egypt:In this week's Science, John Bohannon discusses the dilemma faced by Egypt as the Nile delta sinks. With the strong likelihood of the Mediterranean rising as the climate changes, the options available to Egypt are few and costly. Egypt constructed the massive Aswan High Dam in 1960, with the help of the Soviet Union.The article says:Today, 30% of the land is less than a meter above sea level, and in some areas close to the Mediterranean coast, it is sinking by nearly a centimeter per year.At the same time, the Mediterranean Sea is expected to rise as a result of global warming. If the sea level increases by a meter by 2050, which is in the range of mainstream predictions, one-third of the delta could be lost. Meanwhile, the population here is growing by a million people per year—the delta is already home to 50 million, most crammed into an area no bigger than the state of Delaware. Because of these perfect storm conditions, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 named the Nile Delta among the three areas most vulnerable to climate change. "If we continue with business as usual, the impact on the delta will be devastating," says Mounir Tabet, director of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Egypt.http://www.sciencemag.org/content/327/5972/1444.full

Whether climate change has had any influence on the recent political change in Egypt or not, the country is highly vulnerable to global warming.

Exactly, the rise in global food prices did not help but the loss of internal agricultural productivity was a strong amplifying feedback and is/was coupled to sea level rise and climate change. You can argue about whether the global food price rise was due to climate change, but you cannot argue that climate change was not a significant factor in the food situation in Egypt contributing strongly to the lack of support for the Mubarek government.

In countries like Bangladesh, Egypt etc where deltas are likely to become permanently inundated and there is already high population density, the first impact is likely to be disease. Unless there are plans to develop new areas with essential public health infrastructure (water, drainage etc in particular) then the closest 'dry' towns and cities will become stretched to the limit and diseases like cholera would be expected to affect many more millions; not just those who have been forced to move - before starvation from poverty and food shortages hit.

I shouldn't say 'before starvation from poverty and food shortages hit'. What I meant was that the impact of disease from local migration of people will probably have a devastating impact in terms of disease, which may initially be much greater than the immediate impact of poverty and food shortages, and exacerbate these two latter.

Oh, if only I was as talented as other rabbets and able to express myself more succinctly (and accurately) :(

I don't think that the real effects of global warming have really been felt yet. What has happened is that we have passed Peak Oil and so gas and food prices have soared. That is what is annoying the new middle class in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world.

It may have been noted in one of the links, but the Aswan dam is itself a major factor in the Delta's loss of elevation. Of course the dam's supply of irrigation water presumably did boost food production, at least for a while, but in the long-term the dam was the proverbial Faustian bargain. Similar effects can be seen in other big deltas with highly-modified watersheds (e.g. the Mississippi, the Colorado, the Sacramento-San Joaquin and the Murray-Darling, the Tigris-Euphrates, and a number of South and East Asian ones.). Push either has or is in the process of coming to shove for all. Even writing off the deltas, over-subscription of water supply is a further push (an exception being the Mississippi, which doesn't see large-scale irrigation diversions).

Any succeeding Egyptian regime is going to find itself between a rock and a hard place, but an honest government perceived by the populace as doing what it can to solve problems is unlikely to be overthrown, even in extreme circumstances.

Re the Nile again, I imagine that groundwater overdrafting and saltwater intrusion (due also to reduced flow) will become problems if they aren't already.

I was thinking yesterday that a possible source of internal conflict for Egypt will be the military budget, given that the military is much larger than would seem to be required for immediate needs (if there's no loonger a military dictatorship to prop up) and that other economic sectors could use the money, but then today it occurred to me that in the long term Egypt may well want to maintain a large military in order to threaten upstream neighbors who want to divert Nile water for their own purposes. Interesting times.

Carrick, you want to look at food prices as a percentage of income for poor Egyptians, obviously focused on wheat, and combine that with the extreme corruption of the regime and the sense by the Egyptian public that prospects with those people in charge would have continued to be dismal. The wheat price spike was just a trigger. Expecting people to draw a conclusion based solely on that graph is Pielkean.

Eli, you're absolutely right about that. I've been trying to remember where I've seen more extensive data. Of course there is a relationship between oil and food prices. When you see a peak in oil costs, there's a corresponding bump in food prices.

I'm a bit dense at times, but I'm not seeing how this increase relates in any meaningful way to climate change (a five year period is a pretty short duration compared to anthropogenic forcing time scales).

The explanation I've heard in the past for the recent upward trend in prices is, it is partly related to oil costs, but also an increase in demand. As societies industrialize (for example), fewer people are left on the farms, which raises demand for internationally grown agricultural goods.

But of course the long term trend is improved agricultural efficiency and associated lower costs.

Steve Bloom: The wheat price spike was just a trigger. Expecting people to draw a conclusion based solely on that graph is Pielkean

Pielkean? LOL, I think the word you're looking for is "evidence based", and I thought we were discussing global warming as a trigger for revolution, not regionalized weather-related spikes in food prices.

In any case, you are making a claim ("wheat price spike was just a trigger") without any substantiation. What term you want to ascribe to that is your choice.

According to what I've read, the protests had an amalgamation of causes, including "growing poverty" and "autocratic government" and its success largely depended on the free flow of information (the internet, social networks such as twitter and facebook, cell phone & text messaging). The success of the revolution in Tunisia is probably related too as the most important trigger.

Secondly, if climate change were negatively affecting food prices, you'd expect to see a long-term, because that's what anthropogenic climate change looks like. That's the interest in looking at long term trends.

Why wouldn't you think long term trends are important if you're trying to measure the impact of global warming on food prices and the stability of governments ?

The thing is that food prices can be affected in the short term as well as the long term. This year Russia's drought led to them banning exports, I believe. I don't know whether that drought was caused by climate change, but since we expect climate change to cause more extreme weather events like it to happen, we should expect more crop failures.

Link from this blog: http://the-mound-of-sound.blogspot.com/2011/01/let-them-eat-cake.html

And in the Guardian:

"...Brown warned that the longer term outlook was also bleak. Many arid countries have managed to boost their agricultural production by using underground water sources, but these are rapidly drying up. He cited Saudi Arabia, which has been self-sufficient in wheat for decades but whose wheat production is collapsing as the aquifer that fed the farms is depleted.

Water scarcity, combined with soil erosion, climate change, the diversion of food crops to make biofuels, and a growing population, were all putting unprecedented pressure on the world's ability to feed itself, according to Brown. This would fuel political instability and could lead to unrest or conflicts, he said. "We have an entirely new situation in the world. We need to recognise this."..."

I think the doctor is still out as to whether we "expect climate change to cause more extreme weather events," and if so what time span would be needed for a measurable signal from climate change would be need.

Eli, unfortunately that data set appears to end at the same date (November, 1991) as the FAO numbers (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). The fao link has the data in a downloadable format, and breaks it down by category (meat, diary, cereals, oils, sugar).

A rather extensive treatise of the Egyptian food prices and government subsidies system. Social unrest (or perceived risk of such unrest) is a controlling factor in the subsidies system. It appears that there are limits to expansion of the government role.

I have no idea if food prices are better reflected as a percentage of GDP or not - might be useful in the case of a single country I suppose, provided it is adjusted for inflation.

However the FAO report states that food price index, which is "a measure of the monthly change in international prices of a basket of food commodities", as at January 2011 is the highest since 1990 in real and nominal terms. (For those whose wages have risen above inflation then wages might have kept pace with food prices.)

http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/FoodPricesIndex/en/

AFAIK, for a lot of people, wages have not risen above inflation and for some their wages have not kept pace with inflation.

Try comparing what is "middle class" in the United States to what "middle class" was in 1970 (three bed room home w/ AC, owning at least one TV and two cars). There is a lot of overlap between people who are considered to be in poverty now (based on what is IMO a very poor metric) and what was middle class then.

As I pointed out above, the FAO only goes back to 1990. It also doesn't factor in global change in income (GDP is easier to track, its a rough proxy for family income).

Sou, I'm not an economist (I'm a physicist) and what I said "GDP is a rough proxy". That is something to use when the actual figures aren't readily available.

You'd have to adjust for things like increased capital investment over time (in general the fraction of total wages decreases over time as a nation industrializes). But the relationship isn't terrible:

The other interesting thing to think about is, as third world nations industrialize (and wages go up), one might expect their food demands will increase more rapidly than their population growth rate, at the same time all of that extra CO2 associated with their industrialization hits the atmosphere.

Carrick, are you trying to argue that food prices only go up if demand increases and if people have more money? What about if demand is about the same but there is not enough food to fill that demand? That is, if the supply of food has diminished, as in this year when there have been major crop failures, and the world's global food reserves are lower because of the previous food shortage?

Carrick's just a run-of-the-mill cornucopian trying to win an argument, Holly (thus "Pielkean"). The uncredentialed HuffPo link he provided me was a hint.

Anybody other than Carrick who would like a nice window into the situatiuon from someone qualified to speak directly about the issue of food process in the Middle East should have a look at Rami Zurayk's Land and People blog. Here he quotes with approval a WSJ post on the subject, including this nice summary:

"The protests in Egypt, Tunisia and Jordan are all clearly rooted in deep political grievances against brutal dictatorships, but they have their origins in soaring food prices. The chart below from Absolute Strategy Research shows why: Egypt has one of the highest levels of spending on food as a proportion of total spending in the emerging markets. It is hardly surprising that huge rises in food prices should bring people out on to the streets."

More or less what I said, I do believe. Rami has lots more, and it really is worth keeping up with his blog. (He also has a lot on the tendency of Western media to place too much emphasis on the food price factor, noting that Arabs are not "battery chickens.") I won't bother going to fetch any of it, but Krugman has written a fair amount on this as well, with lots of data.

As for the climate chnage connection, it's not just the unprecedented Russian event of last summer (although it in combination with the linked Pakistan event does show a climate change fingerprint), it's the contemporaneous whacking by extreme weather of major wheat-producing regions all over the world (Oz, Canada, Argentina, now China {bad news indeed given that it's the largest wheat producer], and early signs of trouble in the northern U.S. wheat belt due to lack of snow cover for the winter wheat). The Carricks of the world are quite desperate for all of this not to be seen as AGW-connected, so they will argue every link in the chain.

Holly Stick, no I'm not arguing that. I'm pointing out that as people have more money the demand for food grows, and as demand for food grows, so do food prices. Of course so does improved agriculture efficiency (what we call in the US "intensive agricultural practices"). Improved economic efficiency equals lower food costs.

I mentioned earlier there are other reasons, such as energy prices, and I certainly agree with you that weather influences prices too, as does climate.

I also pointed out that weather doesn't equal climate, and a two year spike does not a long-term trend make. There are plenty of other examples of weather related crop failures, going well back into the Little Ice Age.

I also asked how one quantifies whether a given set of weather events are climate related or "just" weather. Do you have a suggestion for how to do that?

Steve Bloom, just wow. That was a hot mess of poo you managed to stir up by yourself. Congrats.

Thanks for the Rami Zurayk reference, and no I hadn't seen it and what's his credentials that makes him uniquely gifted to recognize the core causes of the revolution, when so many other have failed?

As to the other, I'd flip the statement this way:

"The Steve Blooms of the world are quite desperate for all of this to be seen as AGW-connected, so they will argue every link in the chain."

Maybe you should stop trying to read other people's minds. It makes you look like an idiot.

I'm not personally "desperate for all of this not to be seen as AGW-connected" nor am I close minded that it couldn't be. I'm asking reasonable questions (we call it "critical think" where I come from).

How do you justify your unreasonable response? Is that "Pielkian" logic too?

Perhaps this guy isn't credentialed enough for Steve Bloom, or may be he also engages in "Pielkian" reasoning, who knows. Nonetheless, it's fully referenced, and describes a number of major weather related famines (including the ones at the start of the LIA as well as the Great Potato Famine).

When looking at prices over time, adjusting for inflation is good. But the idea that dividing by GDP resembles adjusting for inflation is simply wrong. Two words: population growth. Per capita GDP might be a sort-of ok proxy for inflation, but GDP is not. However, that's moot. Why make up some possible proxy statistic when you can simply compare inflation adjusted wages vs inflation adjusted prices over time? The conclusion that food commodity prices have exceeded the 2008 spike and are at an all time high is well founded.

Greg: But the idea that dividing by GDP resembles adjusting for inflation is simply wrong. . Two words: population growth. Per capita GDP might be a sort-of ok proxy for inflation, but GDP is not

Per capita GDP as a proxy for inflation??? Um, no that's certainly not true. In general, societies become more productive as they become more developed (so GDP per capita is expected to grow faster than CPI).

My only point is if you're measuring as a % GDP, you either use unadjusted prices and unadjusted GDP or you use adjusted prices and adjusted GDP. Either way the CPI divides out.

Why make up some possible proxy statistic when you can simply compare inflation adjusted wages vs inflation adjusted prices over time?

As I pointed out, it's just a proxy and world "GDP" isn't really a "made up" stastistic in any case (it's readily available).

Of course, if we had the global inflation adjusted prices going back further than 1990 (that's as far back as the FAO data goes) obviously we'd use that. If you have a link, I'd be happy to see it.

The conclusion that food commodity prices have exceeded the 2008 spike and are at an all time high is well founded.

Actually they are at a high since 1990 according to the FAO data. Calling that "all time high" is not well founded.

5. In both the Tunisian and the Egyptian cases, the organization model of the uprisings is interesting to study: it is a cellular organization, that relies heavily on communication and uses a combination of old and very modern means and methods. Its leadership is extremely fluid, I would call it nodal, which gives it tremendous resilience, because there is no one central "brain" that can be destroyed, bought, or corrupted. In many respects, it has similarities with the way digital information systems are organized, and it is no surprise that these same systems played an important role in organizing action. I am not talking here only about internet and facebook and twitter, but also about cell phones and satellite media. The role Al Jazeera played in the Egyptian uprising will be the subject of many PhD thesis. This would also make for a very interesting study on how our ways of thinking and organizing, especially among the youth, has been influenced by the technologies that have changed our world.This sounds an awful lot like something I said earlier. Oh well, I must have gotten lucky

6. And my final learning of the day: The days of the Zionist entity are numbered, and I may even see its demise in my life time. But this, the Zionists already know: I can hear their weeps across the border.

If the world's short of food, and they have Google, the USA is going to have some 'splainin' to do some day.

"How does World's Best Cat Litter™'s clumping work?Made with a patented process, World's Best Cat Litter™ is the only litter made of whole-kernel corn ...."

"Healthy Pet™ Milled Grain™ is a unique formula made from grain by products that manages odor created from cat urine...."

"This cat litter is basically coarse cornmeal .... couldn't I make my own? For about $7.50 (maybe even cheaper) I can buy a 50# bag of cracked corn. For about $30 on ebay (with shipping), I can buy a cheap grain mill ...."

Carrick, you should read a more recent book by Brian Fagan called The Great Warming, published 2008. He describes how during the Medieval Warm Period there may have been warming and joy abounding in Europe, but there were decades-long droughts in parts of Africa, Eurasia and the Americas. He predicts that droughts will be much worse and more widespread in the future as a result of climate change.

Climate scientists and non-scientists like me who have been paying attention have been predicting climate change for years, which means less stable weather, which means more crop failures. So when we had disasters in Russia and Pakistan and Australia and more, we did not jump up and say 'Oh look, a convenient disaster we can use to claim that climate change is occurring.' No, we say things like 'This is what I have been afraid of, and it is probably going to get worse. We have got to convince everyone to take action.'

As to this, "Climate scientists and non-scientists like me who have been paying attention have been predicting climate change for years, which means less stable weather, which means more crop failures."

I'd like to understand better for myself how one distinguishes "normal weather patterns" from "abnormal ones driven by AGW," and by this I mean in a quantitative, statistics-based fashion.

his summer's events don't really look that abnormal to me, as weather pattern go.. The blocking high over the east (ice-free) Hudson Bay has more promise to be something tied more closely to climate change. (Of course Pakistan's problems relate to governmental incompetence and a lack of a real flood warning system as much as the extremity of the flooding itself). And even the heat spell in Russia was very regionalized geographically (again suggesting normal variability not a harbinger for things to come).

I'm afraid in terms of taking action, I'm a complete bear on that, I think it will never happen at any real level (except perhaps adaptation and development of alternative fuel technologies). I just don't think anything more drastic is going to be palatable politically.

Sou, as I have pointed out 20-dozen times now, the FAO FPI only goes back to 1990. I was just trying to find a way to extend it further back into time. And it's a complete, gross mischaracterization of what I said to suggest I was "touting it as better than the Food Price Index developed and used by the FAO".

“Even though the summer price hikes have eased for the time being, the situation is still desperate,” Hamdi Abdelazim, an economist and former president of the Cairo-based Sadat Academy for Administrative Sciences said. “If the rise in food costs persists, there will be an explosion of popular anger against the government.”

Sorry, Carrick, if you took what I wrote as having a personal go at you. It wasn't intended.

(I was following up on ideas, not people. I did not read any particular hidden meaning in what you wrote, nor was I able to read into your posts that you understood the meaning of the Food Price Index. The fact that you floated the idea of using GDP did suggest the opposite. But I'm not an expert in economics either :) )

Interestingly, in terms of reasons stated by agricultural officials, in addition to increased global demand (linked to industrialization) and weather related disruptions is the repurposes of food crops for ethanal ( this echos Hank Roberts observation):

“The U.S. government made a surprisingly deep 9 percent cut in its forecast for corn stockpiles on Wednesday, projecting the tightest supply-to-use ratio since the Great Depression as more of the feedgrain is used to make ethanol. Corn prices in Chicago jumped to their highest level since July 2008 following the Agriculture Department report, which threatened to rekindle heated debate about using crops for fuel as food prices soar and big importers scramble to build up stocks in order to head off civic unrest.”

John, most of the people on Tahrir Square weren't there because they were hungry and couldn't afford food. For example:

NOLAND: Well the basic problem they have is one of employment. They have, like other economies in the Middle East, a demographic bulge. So the number of new people entering the job force is about 4 percent a year. So they have to generate jobs. Unemployment in Egypt is almost 10 times as high for college graduates as it is for people who have gone through elementary school. So they have a basic problem with unemployment, but particularly urban, youth, educated unemployment and those are precisely the people who you see out in the streets.

(From the public radio piece: "Marcus Noland is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.")

"What we're getting now is a first taste of the disruption, economic and political, that we'll face in a warming world," [Krugman] wrote, predicting more and worse unrest given our failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"I'm a big global warming person, and I think climate change in the next century will be the largest determinant of human civilization," he said.

"(But) this is not global warming, not yet. It definitely will be in the next century. The change in global temperatures has been about one degree over the last century," he said, adding, "We've had some pretty extreme weather here, but not unprecedented droughts and floods."

While Patzert acknowledges floods and fires in Australia, droughts in China and Russia's droughts and heat wave precipitated the recent wheat crisis, he calls them "definitely extreme, but not record-breaking or unprecedented."

"Krugman had some good points...The only thing I would say is it's a preview of coming attractions not a first taste yet," he said.

Our group, together with the PTS (Provisional Technical Secretariat of the CTBTO) just did an 18-nation deployment of sensors in the Middle East (centered on Israel) for a preplanned explosive event in mid-January. I'm glad it was in January, not February. We had one cancellation: The deployment to Tunisia, where we got very lucky, our person was scheduled to fly into Tunisia just a few days before the revolution there. (Egypt was not on the list.)

Also, some of my work has applications in monitoring violent weather events (hurricanes, strong thunderstorms, tornados). I stand to gain personally and professionally if the argument can be made that violent weather events will become more frequent in the future. In other words, there's a bit of a conflict of interest on my part. Steve Bloom was 100% off target about my interests and motives: I'd like to sharpen the arguments so they don't sound like hot air when we pitch ideas to funding agencies.

It's of course true that if global warming were already causing unrest that would further strengthen our arguments for the need for improved severe weather monitoring.

Anyway thanks to everybody who had constructive comments to make on this.

> most of the people on Tahrir Square > weren't there because they were > hungry and couldn't afford food.

Not necessarily relevant... most of them probably knew and loved people in that situation... and there's that thing called "nationhood". And yes, hungry people rarely make revolution -- they don't have the energy.

Holly, it's my impression that most of those kids are children of middle and/or upper class families (as I mentioned the majority are college graduates). I wouldn't think "personally not being able to afford food" was necessarily a strong motive here. If you could find evidence to the contrary, that'd be interesting.

I see this as a mixing pot of a flat economy for two years, no new employment prospects combined with high inflation rates, and a large pool of educated, unemployed youth. There may be a place to fit global warming in there as the trigger, but you could as easily blame a global recession, it seems to me.

I think this is a good note for me to end my contribution to this thread on:

Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

"[...] this is not global warming, not yet. It definitely will be in the next century. The change in global temperatures has been about one degree over the last century," he said, adding, "We've had some pretty extreme weather here, but not unprecedented droughts and floods."

While Patzert acknowledges floods and fires in Australia, droughts in China and Russia's droughts and heat wave precipitated the recent wheat crisis, he calls them "definitely extreme, but not record-breaking or unprecedented."

"Krugman had some good points...The only thing I would say is it's a preview of coming attractions not a first taste yet," he said.

> I wouldn't think "personally not being able to afford food" > was necessarily a strong motive here.

My impression too. But that's rather typical: change is made by privileged, well informed groups that don't have to spend all their energy just to keep body and soul together. Still, these folks may embody the aspirations of their nation.

Going way back to that graph of falling food prices ...>My only real problem with this graph is that it appears to be just US prices. I would expect it to reflect world commodity prices, but I can't say for sure.

Well, that was the other point I thought about raising but thought it was too obvious. US retail food prices are pretty close to unlinked to world commodity food prices. See http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/is-inflation-baked-in/ for just one example (Technically it shows the lack of linkage between retail and commodity just domestically, but that's sufficient!) It's in countries where people purchase the raw commodities directly, or after only one step of processing, that the recent spikes in commodity food prices cause real pain to the consumer.

Carrick, it seems you depart not much better informed than you arrived.

I'll see that Patzert with Trenberth and raise you Hansen. But anyway Patzert seems to have failed to address the key point that it's the pattern of extreme events, not whether any of them are individually unprecedented (although Trenberth, who ought to know, believes the Russian and Pakistan events were; that may also be true for the Oz rains).

Rami Zurayk says the Egyptian demonstrations were started by the children of the relatively affluent who were then joined by the poor. Note that the former group also has a severe unemployment problem, although presumably they don't have to worry so much about the price of flour.

Rami also says a key factor was a long-term sense of injustice combined with a growing realization that there was little hope that things would do anything other than get worse under the (kleptocratic) regime.

Martin, Greg and Steve I appreciate the comments. All I really have for (trying to beat a conference deadline), but the link to Krugman was very interesting as were the comments from Zurayk. Regarding Trenberth & Hansen vs other climatologists, it will be interesting to see what they say about it at AR5. Or even what people say in peer-review.

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett, a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny who finally handed in the keys and retired from his wanna be research university. The students continue to be naive but great people and the administrators continue to vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional without Eli's help. Eli notices from recent political developments that this behavior is not limited to administrators. His colleagues retain their curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they, or at least some of them occasionally heeded his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.